Field
Communication networks in general may benefit from appropriate policy based management. More particularly, heterogeneous networks or heterogeneous networks (HetNets) may benefit from methods for policy based management.
Description of the Related Art
Heterogeneous network management is generally discussed in the third generation partnership project (3GPP) technical report (TR) 32.835, ver. 0.0.3 of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Generally, HetNets are large networks, which may include about ten times more network elements (NEs) within the network than traditional networks. Moreover, HetNets may have strict restrictions on operating expenses (OPEX).
One approach to HetNet management is policy based management, in which individual network elements may be grouped by their “importance” and groups may be assigned “active” or “passive” roles, either actively generating management data or passively waiting to be polled by the manager. This approach can involve the operator manually tagging the network elements as being associated with a particular importance group.
The static, manual allocation of network elements to the groups with similar importance characteristics to be managed by corresponding “active”/“passive” policies does not take into account variations in the level of traffic load, for example, a cell may be located in a shopping mall, which is heavily loaded during day time and idle during night time, or a cell may be located in a business center heavily loaded on weekdays and idle on weekends, and so forth.
The binary, active/passive, management policies do not allow flexibility of control over the amount of generated management data and resulting OPEX in consideration of changing environment.